Data within relational databases are typically accessed by sending commands to database servers that manage the databases. Such commands must conform to a database language supported by the database server. Structured Query Language (SQL) is a database language supported by many database systems.
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard for representing data. Many applications are now being designed to expect input data in the form of XML documents. When the data provided to the applications comes from a relational database, the data typically has to be reformatted into an XML document.
When data is presented as an XML document, the recipient of the document must understand the structure of the XML document. When the XML document is generated from the result of a relational database query, the structure of resulting XML document will typically vary based on the nature of the query. Consequently, the process of transforming the relational data to an XML document, and generating data that indicates the structure of the XML document thus produced, can be cumbersome and inflexible.
Based on the foregoing, it is desirable to provide techniques for transforming relational data into XML in an intelligent, flexible and efficient manner.